We talked to Samar Singla, the Founder and CEO of Jugnoo. In less than 3 years, Samar has taken what started of as an on-demand auto-rickshaw app and transformed it to a hyper-local app, serving all needs. Whether that’s grocery and food delivery or on-demand logistics for your business. Today, Jugnoo is present in 39 cities across India, processing 45k transactions a day for 4.3M users.
1. How is Jugnoo avoiding the failures of other ride-sharing companies – 3 ways Jugnoo is doing things differently (and better)
Jugnoo faces high competition from cab services such as Uber and Ola. Our strategy to avoid failures while learning from our competitors include:
One, Jugnoo doesn’t follow a cash burning model. As an example, we focus on providing customer satisfaction through our services, which in turn leads to more Jugnoo users through word of mouth. The idea is not to bother potential customers by bombarding them with advertising messages but to build a network of loyal and happy customers through the quality of our services.
Two, we focus not only on the customers willing to spend less on travel and are indifferent to the mode of transport, but more specifically on customers using public transport in their daily lives. The aim is to provide auto rides at a price that is affordable for anyone who’d rather use public transport. Therefore, the market we operate in are Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities of India – wherein the majority of population still travels by buses. Jugnoo’s presence has organised transportation industry in such cities.
Three, we offer partnership to auto rickshaw drivers and help them to improve their efficiency by providing alternative uses to their auto rickshaws. This helps us to diversify the risk of failure and decreases the dependence of auto rickshaw drivers on passenger rides only. Higher utilisation means, more income generation and thus, a better standard of living for the drivers!
2. What was the most unique challenge to setting up Jugnoo?
Jugnoo deals mainly with auto rickshaw drivers, who are usually not very well educated and rely mainly on passenger rides for their daily income. Therefore, convincing them to use technology to boost their business and make the whole process of booking rides easier, was highly challenging for Jugnoo. This meant not only educating the auto rickshaw drivers to use technology but also winning their confidence that this was the right thing to do. Realising the challenge in hand, Jugnoo has intentionally made driver’s app extremely user friendly, offering the platform in multiple regional languages. Additionally, it offers a helpline number to drivers, where they can reach out any time during the day.
3. How do you maintain your company culture during rapid expansion?
Jugnoo has realized that the most critical factor to maintain company culture during its growth journey is the power of communication in adapting to the ever-changing business environment. We’ve always encouraged open and transparent communication at all levels of management. Since we are a tech company and try to adopt technology in most of our processes, we use Workplace by Facebook as communication platform. This makes the process of communication faster and efficient as employees can reach anybody in the organisation within seconds!
4. How do you maintain your core product offering quality during rapid expansion?
Given Jugnoo’s nature of business and the speed of its growth, the most critical factor to its success is the use of technology. Therefore, the core product offering is backed up with ever-evolving technological backbone. Recently, we adopted Artificial Intelligence and Analytics for making data-driven informed decisions, specially in case of delivering goods, and route optimisation. Jugnoo also offers a marketplace of apps for both drivers and customers. Therefore, maintaining core product offering is ensured by using latest technology in all its process and offerings.
Samar will be speaking at StartCon on the 1st & 2nd of December! Have you locked in your tickets yet?
